Suchergebnisse

'Why Atheism?' by George H. Smith is reviewed.

Recent studies have convincingly demonstrated that Soviet state atheism continues to influence how religion is understood and practiced in present-day Central Asia. In Kyrgyzstan, however, a new generation of atheists is emerging whose ideas about atheism—and about religion—are informed more by globally circulating neo-atheist ideas and images. This paper explores their efforts to live atheist lives and be true to their atheist convictions, and the images of religion that play into the process. Focusing on the role of social media in particular, I will argue that while many, at least initially, embrace these platforms as ways to encounter like-minded individuals and experience moral community, what they encounter there are often images of atheism and its religious "others" with which they cannot identify and which often seem irrelevant to the challenges of everyday life, in which coexistence with (and caring for) religious others are central concerns for many.

Of the essays that Indian nationalist Bhagat Singh published in his lifetime, 'Why I am an Atheist' has remained especially popular. Bhagat Singh published the essay from jail in 1930, largely as a response to his critics among the revolutionaries, who worried that anticolonial stardom had gone to Bhagat Singh's head – or alternatively that his anticolonial agitation had been motivated by arrogance and egotism. Quite different from the the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army's response to M. K. Gandhi – 'The Philosophy of the Bomb' – 'Why I am an Atheist' marks a different philosophical territory, one that this essay will attempt to explore in detail. This essay demonstrates the productive relationship between religion and interwar philosophy that stands at the centre of Bhagat Singh's concerns, the global conversation that he thus partakes in, and the relationship, ultimately, between doubt and anticolonialism. Treating this text as philosophical without reducing it to an anti-theological screed reveals the possibilities of an ethics that avoids the transcendent authority of both colonial rule and anticolonial response.

MARXIST ATHEISTS ARE BETTER ABLE TO DEAL WITH RELIGION IN EVERYDAY WORK: THEY ARE IN A BETTER SITUATION TO WIN OVER OR AT LEAST NEUTRALIZE MEMBERS OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT WHILE COMBATTING THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT'S IDEAS; AND TO MAKE EFFECTIVE ALLIANCES AND COALITIONS WITH ADHERENTS OF LIBERATION THEOLOGY WITHOUT BEING CONDENSCENDING. IN ALL OF THIS, RATIONALIST ATHEISTS ARE LIMITED BECAUSE OF THEIR LACK OF THE TOOLS THE MARXIST HAS: THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGIOUS AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS AS EMANATIONS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE. THIS IS THE CRUCIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MARXIST AND RATIONALIST ATHEISM, AND IT IS THIS WHICH MAKES THE MAXIST ATHEIST NOT MERELY IRRELIGIOUS BUT AN ACTIVE PROPONENT OF FULL HUMAN LIBERATION.